42 blog reactions to http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0108/8109.html

several rumor experts about Obama's efforts to fight the Muslim claim. In politics, conventional wisdom holds that the best way to neutralize a whisper campaign is to ignore it. The experts thought this was a bad plan, and they praised Obama's camp for aggressively pushing back at the Muslim rumor every time it's popped up in the news. Strangely, though, Fight the Smears represents a step backward from many of the campaign's previous get-out-the-truth efforts. The site presents fewer facts to back up its truths than did

truly changes the old rules of attack and response. The old political wisdom, which Obama decided to abandon last fall, woiuld have been not to dignify them with a response. The new is that sunlight is the best remedy. The site also expands on an effort Carrie Budoff Brown and I wrote about last fall to counter the viral emails with viral responses, including a tool allowing supporters to upload their own address books and blast out debunkings. (via

Two days after I wrote this awesome piece, the Politico stole all my ideas for an article that's not nearly as good.

To all you Obama supporters: Is he Shiite or Sunni?” and lamenting “how foolish we have become” now that “a large segment of our population wants one of the [Islamic] devils to be their President”  The Obama campaign has been waging a determined, low-intensity war

political risks, which probably explains the supine silence of the rest of Kucinich’s colleagues. None of the presidential candidates, including Barack Obama, spoke out against the blockade. He was probably too busy defending himself against “smears” that he is a Muslim.

"He's Muslim," she leans in to whisper. I lean in closer and reply "He's not." Barack Obama is a Christian. But he's also one from a varied cultural and religious family, the specifics of which are spawning all sorts of misinformation as the Illinois senator campaigns for nomination as the Democratic party???s presidential candidate. The facts: Obama had a black African father who hailed from a Christian/Muslim family; a white Kansan mother who balked at organized religion but

was to discuss issues of import to the Middle East, not to discuss the false Muslim rumor. That Obama is still addressing this particular rumor -- proved false time and again -- speaks to the perniciousness of negative chatter in an Internet age. The Politico's Ben Smith and Carrie Budoff Brown penned a terrific piece on the extended battle the Obama campaign has fought for the better part of the last year against an underground e-mail campaign seeking to spread negative information about the candidate's religious background.

article about Barack Obama’s rift with some seedy purveyor of spin and hubris

this email. The email campaign has been so successful that right wing news organizations had repeated it as fact. This forced Obama to add a page to his senatorial website -- "Debunked Insight Magazine and Fox News Smear Campaign." This weekend, Politico reported, "For over a year, largely out of the media glare, Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign has been fighting a determined, low-intensity conflict against the viral e-mail that forwards the myth that Obama is a crypto-Muslim Manchurian

. Any way you slice it, that’s a phenomenal number, and it’s more evidence that Obama has become the true online fundraising juggernaut of the cycle. The Politico's Ben Smith and Carrie Budoff Brown investigate Obama's coordinated response to the continuing email campaign trying to spread "the myth that Obama is a crypto-Muslim Manchurian candidate." The campaign has been fighting the messages since it launched a year ago, and the campaign says it doesn't